Major sites’ privacy policies analyzed for data protection quality

Privacy is of major concern for many Internet users, and in light of leaks by Snowden many have focused their attention on tech companies, wanting to know what they're doing to keep data private. Sorting that out for yourself can be difficult, and so the EFF has broken the particulars down into a simple visual chart.

In the company's "Who Has Your Back? 2014: Protecting Your Data From Government Requests" report, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, more commonly called the EFF, has evaluated major tech companies' policies and practices to see which best protect one's data.

The evaluation's criteria included whether companies do things like require a warrant to get data, tell their users about any applicable data requests that come in, have published guidelines for law enforcement, oppose surveillance, and more.

While there's a massive write-up covering each company the EFF looked at, they made it easy to digest by ranking each company by category using a star. Facebook, Dropbox, Credo Mobile, Microsoft, Sonic.net, and Yahoo! all hit five stars, while Snapchat only earned one star and AT&T earned two.